A rare work of narrative nonfiction that illuminates a world most of us do not see: the daily lives of the severely mentally sick, who are medicated, marginalized, locked away and shunned.

Susan Doherty’s groundbreaking reserve provides us a population of shed souls, ill-served by society, feared, shunted from locked wards to rooming homes to the roads to jail and again. For days gone by ten years, some of the people who routine in and from the seriously ill wards of the Douglas Institute in about The Ghost Backyard: In the lives of schizophrenia’s feared and neglected Montreal, have present a friend in Susan, who volunteers in the ward, and follows her close friends out in to the world as they struggle to get through their days.

With their complete co-operation, she brings us their tales, which task the ways we consider people who have mental illness on every page. The spine of the book is the existence of Caroline Evans (not her actual name), a female in her early sixties whom Susan has known since she was a bright and sunny school girl. Caroline had formed a close a friendly relationship with Susan and distributed tales from her lifestyle; through her, we encounter what coping with schizophrenia over time is actually like. She’s been through everything, including the method the justice program treats the seriously mentally ill: at one stage, she believed that she could save her roommate through the devil by pouring boiling water into her ear…

Susan interleaves Caroline’s story with vignettes about her other friends, human tales that reveal their expectations, their conditions, their personalities, their humanity. She’s discovered that if she can suspend in through the initial ten to quarter-hour of every espresso date with someone in the grasp of psychosis, then true communication results. Their ‘madness’ is not otherworldly: rather it tells us something about how exactly they’re surviving their lives and what they are through. The Ghost Garden isn’t just touching, but posesses cargo of compassion and empathy.